Читать книгу Edward Burne-Jones - Frances Spalding - Страница 10

Burne-Jones’s disappointment with Oxford was at first intense, proportionate to the vastness of his expectations. There was still no room in college for him when he arrived in the January of 1854. He had to get his meals out and sleep, a most unwelcome raw provincial guest, in someone else’s study. In a few weeks he was writing to Cormell Price that he meant only to try for a pass degree. ‘I’m wretched, Crom, miserable.’ The stones did not cry out, he could not find the ‘note’. The absence of Newman seemed a positive element. On the other hand, he made in these first few weeks a new friend who seemed as disgusted as himself. This was a thickset dark curly young man – variously described as ‘triumphantly’ and ‘unnecessarily’ curly – who to judge from his Oxford parlour photograph, seems to have worn a velveteen jacket and to have clenched his fists very hard. Ned had noticed his name, the Memorials tell us, when he wrote it on his matriculation paper the year before: William Morris.

Morris took instantly to Burne-Jones, whose background was so unlike his own. This, like many of the things Morris did, must have been a matter of instinct, which told him that the likenesses between the two were as important as the differences. Physically they looked as unlike as they well could do. Ned was too tall and too pale, gentle, fragile, hesitant, with wide very light eyes and a face ‘oddly tapering towards the chin’, quietly witty until he was excited, then outrageous; Morris looked strong. There was unmanageable energy in his mind as well as his body, so that his characteristic gesture was to hit the air, or his own head, with a kind of smothered exasperation. Morris broke chairs beneath him, Ned sank into them ‘as though his whole spine was seeking rest’. Together they looked like a blundering king and an ailing aspirant to knighthood. Morris had the impatience – as Bernard Shaw pointed out – of the comfortably off, whereas Ned, at Oxford, was ‘distinctly the poorest of anyone I knew’.¹ According to Mackail, neither of them realised this until Ned went to stay at the Morris family house near Walthamstow, but this seems unlikely, particularly as Morris, within a few weeks of meeting Burne-Jones, characteristically offered to share all his money with him.

On the other hand, both were emotional and tender-hearted young men who could rapidly be rendered helpless by affection, and both were depressives who had to face a life-long struggle with melancholia. This black enemy was always in waiting. Both of them had come to Oxford with the same kind of not yet directed idealism, both meant to take orders. Morris, like Burne-Jones, had been under the influence of one of the ‘devoted remnant’, his private coach, F.B. Guy, who had survived, just as John Goss had done, the storm of Newman’s resignation. If he could not give half his money to Burne-Jones, then he was ready to give all of it – catching readily on to this idea – to found a monastic community. In discussing this they must have discovered, what perhaps they might have taken for granted, that both were mediaevalists. But here Ned’s ideas were still hazy, a region where Keats and Tennyson, the Oratory, Hereford Cathedral and the Fairy of the Golden Branch all met, whereas Morris, who had been given a suit of armour at the age of seven and ignored his lessons at Marlborough in favour of books of mediaeval architecture, was already an expert on details. He ‘seemed to have been born knowing them’, Ned thought. Morris already distinguished between two imaginary worlds of the Middle Ages: one clear, hard, active, brightly coloured, highly sexed and plainly furnished, the other a limitless wandering which always led, in the end, to the warring sides of Morris’s temperament, and the difficulty of reconciling them was to cause him both emotional suffering and political inconsistency. The community, if it could be managed when Morris came into £900 per annum the following year, would belong to the second dream.

Meanwhile they poured out their disillusionment to each other on ‘angry walks’. Although Pusey was still at Christ Church, he was now fifty-three and had grown stout; the university, Matthew Arnold wrote in 1854, ‘in losing Newman and his followers had lost its religious movement, which after all kept the place from stagnating’. As a matter of fact, if they could have waited in patience, Morris and Burne-Jones would have seen the beginnings of change in Oxford: the Royal Commission of 1850 had suggested some, Jowett was already at Balliol, and the new University Museum was soon to arise, ‘complete in every detail down to panels and footboards, gas burners and door-handles’ under the eye of Ruskin. It seems, however, that much of their disappointment arose from their choice of college. According to Mackail, the ‘coarseness of manners and morals’ at Exeter was ‘distressing in the highest degree’ to Morris. Burne-Jones, curiously enough, perhaps because he was used to Saturday nights in Birmingham, seems to have minded it less. ‘One night a man threw a heavy cut-glass decanter of port at someone sitting next to me’, he told Rooke, ‘and it went between us both and smashed to pieces on the wall behind, so that we were both drenched in port, shirts and faces and all over our clothes, as though we were covered in blood.’² What impressed Burne-Jones was that the man responsible, who had to be dragged forcibly out of Hall, later became ‘a high dignitary of the church’. Those who did not throw decanters were in a minority. William Redmond, the painter, visited his elder brother at Exeter in 1854: ‘my brother did not belong to the aesthetic set … and among them two of them were pointed out to me as special oddities … These were William Morris and Edward Jones.’

The city, however, was beautiful, still surrounded by its pastoral meadows, as Ned described it, except on the railway side, and ‘there were still many old wooden houses with wood carving and a little sculpture here and there. The chapel of Merton College had been lately renovated by Butterfield, and Pollen, as a former Fellow of Merton, had painted the roof of it. Many an afternoon we spent in that chapel. Indeed I think the buildings of Merton and the cloisters of New College were our chief shrines in Oxford.’ A Miss Smythe had been taken as a model for the angel faces on the Merton chapel roof, a reminder that the ideal of celibacy was the most vulnerable part of the scheme of monastic life. Ned very soon found Oxford a place of unspecified ‘heart-aches’, and Morris’s incoherent story, Frank’s Sealed Letter (1856), which, Mackail tells us, has ‘many details directly taken from his own life’, indicates that ‘wild restless passions’ were giving him the reputation of ‘a weak man’. These were troubles which ran side by side with the lack of spirituality in the university.

If Exeter was uncongenial, however, there was plenty of company in Pembroke, where the King Edward’s boys were installing themselves as a ‘set’. Dixon had gone up a term earlier, and had been joined by two others. Charlie Faulkner (included although he had been educated privately) was a delightful straightforward person, admired by the others because he was their only mathematician. William Fulford, who was older than the rest, was noted as a talker, such a compulsive one that only Morris could stop him, and then virtually by force. In one of their rooms, usually Faulkner’s, and drinking nothing stronger than tea, they sat down to put the world to rights. It is possible that they remained exclusive not altogether from choice. Lady Mander has shown in her Portrait of Rossetti that Faulkner, even much later as a Fellow, was laughed at by the young bloods for his ‘Birmingham boots’. Morris, certainly, was content to accept the ‘set’ as it was, and Dixon remembered how Ned told him ‘in an earnest and excited manner’ how strongly he felt the expansion of his emotion through friendship in this first year. Nevertheless, his hero was no longer the dapper Fulford but ‘Top’ – his own name for Morris – taken, presumably, from the just-published Uncle Tom’s Cabin. ‘Come and see him,’ he wrote to Crom Price, ‘not in the smoke-room or in disputations (the smoke-rooms of the intellect) but by the riverside and the highways, as I alone have seen and heard him’. Much-loved Crom was always a person to be written to and a keeper of letters, so that many of these details come from him. A year later, having won a scholarship to Pembroke, he did come up to ‘see and hear’ Morris, and the set was complete.

In October Ned and Morris were able to get rooms in college, and Ned was awarded an exhibition, though this does not seem to have been paid regularly.³ In the intervals of brass-rubbing, listening to Pusey’s sermons on justification, and exercising at Maclaren’s gym in Oriel Lane, where Ned, who had a very strong wrist, proved unexpectedly good at foils, Morris began a lifelong habit of reading aloud to his friend.

This habit was already well established among the set. They took turns to read Shakespeare in each other’s rooms, and Burne-Jones remembered ‘a poor fellow dying at college while I was at Oxford – his friends took it by turns to read Pickwick to him – he died in the middle of the description of Mr Bob Sawyer’s supper party … and we all thought he had made a good end’.⁴ Morris and Ned together, however, absorbed books as an immediate physical experience. Books were as important to their future careers as painting itself, life for them, and to Burne-Jones in particular, as has been said, the word and the image were inextricably bound up. Books, also, were a form of friendship between them, speaking through the shyness which both of them had to overcome.

Some of those they read were apparently their set texts of Church history and theology, but they were also collecting their own sacred books. Keats reappeared, with Tennyson’s Morte d’Arthur; the Arthurian legends were still so little known that they formed a kind of secret bond. In fact, Tennyson’s original introduction to the Idylls had been an apology for using such a queer old story which most men would burn as ‘trash’, but it had set light to a fire of its own, and Crom was told to learn Galahad by heart. The monastic brotherhood – still much under discussion – would be the Order of Galahad. They also read Morris’s favourite, the Arabian Nights in the Lane illustrated edition, Carlyle’s Past and Present, and the second volume of The Stones of Venice, in which Ruskin relates a nation’s art to its moral values. The three books which mattered most to them, however, are less familiar today. They were Kenelm Digby’s The Broadstone of Honour, de la Motte Fouqué’s Sintram and His Companions and the Heir of Redclyffe, by Charlotte M. Yonge.

The Broadstone of Honour, or the True Sense and Practice of Chivalry was the book which Burne-Jones kept by his bedside for the whole of his life, even after he had come to feel, or at least to say, that it was childish. It is by the antiquarian Catholic Revivalist, Kenelm Digby, who tells us that he conceived the idea when he was travelling with a band of like-minded friends, collecting ‘whatever legends were credible and suitable to the present age’. It is hard to think what Digby could have meant by ‘credible’ here. The castle of Ehrenbreitstein gives the title because the fortress on the rock seems ‘lofty and free from the infection of a base world’. The Arthurian knights are not ‘enchantments which exist but in a dream of fancy … These images are the only objects substantial and unchangeable.’ Here Platonism and Victorian mediaevalism meet.

The Broadstone is elaborately but not intelligibly planned – indeed, it could hardly be so, since the crowded pages were to correspond to ‘the symbolical wanderings of the ancient knights’, during which, Digby says, the Catholic faith itself will save him from inconsistency. Book 2, Tancredus, which must certainly have been Burne-Jones’s favourite, winds gradually into a maze of stories and miracles, designed to show that the knights and monks of old possessed every conceivable virtue. At the end we are returned to nineteenth-century industrial England, ‘and it is as if the night had closed on us, and we are among tangled thorns’.

The author forestalls objections by telling us that these are ‘thoughts that breathe, and words that burn’. It is not a book to analyse, but to be lost in, and if we cannot do this we are not likely to understand Morris’s early poems or Burne-Jones’s early water-colours, the freshest of all their art.

Sintram and his Companions is the winter story in the tales of the four seasons by H. de la Motte Fouqué. Its inspiration is Dürer’s Knight, Death and the Devil, which appears as the frontispiece, and this woodcut version meant more to Morris and Burne-Jones at Oxford than any other graven image. Ned, who was beginning to try to draw, was fascinated by the compact oneness of man and horse, and the electric tension of the line. ‘No scratching of the pen,’ Ruskin wrote, ‘nor any fortunate chance, nor anything but downright skill and thought will imitate so much as one leaf of Dürer’s.’ But to Fouqué, ‘musing on the mysterious engraving’, the importance of the Dürer was its allegory of the noble soul. The hero’s inspiration, in his struggle against his own violent nature, is his mother Verena, who cannot receive him in her cloister in the snows until ‘all is pure in thy spirit as in here’. The vile dwarf, ‘the little Master’, appears to him in moments of sexual temptation, and Death, the bony pilgrim, plays an ambiguous rôle, so that at the end Sintram, who has met him more than once on his journey upwards, must still wait for him.

Among the many haunting moments is the fear which possesses Sintram at the first sight of his own reflection in his bright shield. This image of adolescence recognising its own possibilities entered deeply into Burne-Jones’s imagination. The idea of Sintram’s perseverance went to reinforce others, his father, for example, walking ‘tired miles’ to see a cornfield, Newman at the Oratory, Morris’s offer of all his income to found ‘the monastery’.

If Sintram is inspired by Dürer’s engraving, The Heir of Redclyffe is inspired by Sintram. This, Charlotte M. Yonge’s first real novel, was published in 1853, the very year that Ned and Morris first read it, and, like her other books, was corrected by Keble. Against the background of an amiable country vicarage the hero, Sir Guy Morville, struggles to control the inherited curse of a violent temper. He even cures himself of biting his lip and of ‘cutting pencils’. And Keble’s teaching, that we can live life as a ‘common round’ and still give up the world, is understood so intensely by Guy that his soul consumes his body.

There was, of course, nothing unusual in two young men reading and feeling deeply affected by these three books in 1853. The Broadstone had been one of the hermetic texts of the Young England movement, which Disraeli had tried, or pretended to try, to turn into practical politics. Newman had been so agitated by Sintram that he could only read it in the garden, and alone. The Heir was to be the favourite reading of the young officers in the Crimea. The odd thing is not that Morris and Burne-Jones should have read them so eagerly, but that doing so should have turned them into artists. In 1853 they both intended to enter the Church; in 1854 they still meant to found a monastery. Within a few years they would be collaborating in a decorators’ firm. But there was no real change of moral direction.

The direct link beween Sintram toiling through the snows and the ideal of craftsmanship was Ruskin. Far more attractive than Carlyle’s specific of hard work was Ruskin’s doctrine that to work at anything less than the highest was blasphemy. The second volume of Modern Painters told Burne-Jones and Morris that painting was ‘a noble and expressive language, invaluable as the vehicle of thought, but by itself nothing’, and, as Ned recalled, everything was put aside when the Edinburgh Lectures came out and Ruskin declared that academic painting was at an end and that truth and spirituality lay ‘with a very small number of young men’ who were working here and now in England. These were the Pre-Raphaelites, ‘a somewhat ludicrous name’. In this lecture, as Morris read it aloud to him, Burne-Jones heard for the first time the name of Rossetti; ‘so that for many a day after that we talked of little else but paintings which we had never seen, and saddened the lives of our Pembroke friends.’

However, the two of them had not been affected in quite the same way. The Edinburgh Lectures singled out the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (P.R.B.) for three things: their technical superiority, their ‘enormous cost of care and labour’ (this was to become Ruskin’s Lamp of Sacrifice), and their ‘uncompromising truth’ which in itself was a moral quality. Morris accepted all these things; so that later, when it appeared to him that art, after all, was not a teacher, he would be driven to exclude it from his ideal commonwealth. But Burne-Jones did not, either then or later, believe that art was a moral instrument of any kind. The idea struck him not only as unlikely (‘hardly anything is a lesson to anyone’ he told Rooke⁵) but irrelevent. What he knew from his own experience was that beauty is an essential element without which human nature is diminished. If art gives us beauty it will make us more like human beings.

At the beginning of 1854 Ned wrote a letter to his father which indicates clearly the ‘unmanageable’ nature of his need for beauty that winter. ‘I have just come in from my terminal pilgrimage to Godstow and the burial place of Fair Rosamund. The day has gone down magnificently; all by the river’s side I came back in a delirium of joy, the land was so enchanted with bright colours, blue and purple in the sky, shot over with a dust of golden shower, and in the water, a mirror’d counterpart, ruffled by a light west wind – and in my mind pictures of the old days, the abbey, and long crosiers, gay knights and ladies by the river bank, hawking parties and all the pageantry of the golden age – it made me feel so wild and mad I had to throw stones into the water to break the dream. I never remember having such an unutterable ecstasy, it was quite painful with intensity, as if my forehead would burst. I get frightened of indulging now in my dreams, so vivid that they seem recollections rather than imaginings, but they seldom last more than half an hour; and then the sound of earthly bells in the distance, and presently the wreathing of steam upon the trees where the railway runs, called me back to the years I cannot convince myself of living in.’

From this it appears that ‘ecstasies’ and day-dreams were an accepted part of Ned’s life; in fact that he induced them, and that his experience of Godstow arose from a combination of the winter twilight, the water, pure colour, the legend of Fair Rosamund and her name itself. Burne-Jones seems to have gone on these visits by himself, and the feeling of alienation at the sight of the railway is characteristic. On the other hand, back at Pembroke there was the tea-kettle and chaff of an enviable simplicity, often apparently, ending with a bear-fight, which consisted of pushing someone else over on the floor.

An acute crisis was gathering which bear-fights could not relieve, and it was in this year that Burne-Jones, and probably Morris also, lost their belief in any doctrinal form of Christianity. For Burne-Jones, the process of loss was an agony, even though mid-nineteenth-century Oxford was well accustomed to counsel on the matter. At one point he was very near to ‘going over’ and following Newman, Hurrell Froude and Wilberforce on the path to Rome. This, in 1854, would have been called ‘submitting’. Certainly, Morris and he did not emerge on the other side with the same faith. Morris’s belief was ultimately in this earth, ‘the nesting and grazing of it’, the men and women that inhabit it, and what they could make with their hands. To Morris, humanism came naturally. Burne-Jones, on the other hand, had long been accustomed to hiding his deepest convictions. In later life he was reported as blandly saying that the Resurrection was too beautiful not to be true, and quoting with approval R.L. Stevenson’s Samoan chief who refused to discuss the Deity, saying that ‘we know at night someone goes by among the trees, but we never speak of it’. He became adept at such evasions. But in truth he found, like Ruskin, that to be born Evangelical is a lifelong sentence. He continued to believe in the Gospels, but transferred the meaning of the events, in particular the Annunciation, Mary’s loss of her Son, and the Passion, to the everyday life of humanity. The Redemption meant the alleviation of suffering in this world, and Judgement Day was a continuous process; and there were only two questions asked in Judgement – why did you, and why didn’t you?⁶ The artist has the opportunity to supply the beauty which most lives noticeably lack and for which they cry out, even if they scarcely know it. In so far as he fails to show beauty to other people the artist will be asked, ‘Why didn’t you?’

While these convictions came painfully to him, Burne-Jones had very little reason to believe that he would ever make an artist at all, yet, oddly enough, he had already received his first commission. Archibald Maclaren, surely one of the most unusual proprietors of a gym that Oxford has ever seen, had compiled a volume of the fairy ballads of Europe, and entrusted Ned with the illustrations. Ned had begun a series of minute figures in pen-and-ink, for steel engraving, in the style of Richter and still more of Dicky Doyle, whose set for Ruskin’s King of the Golden River appeared in 1851. Doyle, however, had been trained by his father since infancy in exact draughtsmanship, whereas Burne-Jones had nothing but Mr Cawell’s hints, a few evenings at the Birmingham School of Design, and his own amateur sketches. The illustrations drove him to despair, and in fact were never finished, although Maclaren deferred publication in the hope of getting them.

Meanwhile Morris and Ned were on fire to see the Pre-Raphaelite paintings of the Edinburgh Lectures, or some of them, or even one of them. The place for modern pictures was Wyatt’s, in the High Street. They were allowed there on sufferance, Wyatt apparently lacking the dealer’s instinct which would have told him that the well-off Morris, in his untidy clothes, was a potential buyer. ‘We used to be allowed to look at Alfred Hunt passing through the shop – it would have been too great an honour to be allowed to speak to him.’⁷ This was because Hunt, the water-colourist and landscape artist, was reputed to have seen Millais and Holman Hunt. But in this same year, 1854, Wyatt exhibited Millais’s The Return of the Dove to the Ark, lent by Mr Thomas Combe, the director of the Clarendon Press. The gesture of the girl on the left, gravely and confidently holding the dove to her breast, had seemed ‘dull’ to Ruskin, but made a deep impression on Burne-Jones. Six years later, when Butterfield commissioned him to do an Annunciation window, ‘I insisted on [Mary] taking a dove to her bosom – an innovation; and Butterfield never asked me to do anything again.’⁸

During the following long vacation, Morris went for a tour of northern France and Belgium, and Ned, depressed and penniless, had no alternative but to go home. On the way to Birmingham he passed through London, staying as usual with his Aunt Catherwood. He emerged, half-deafened by brass bands, from the Crystal Palace Exhibition. Paxton’s building itself struck him as a ‘length of cheerless monotony, iron and glass, glass and iron’; he did, however, have the chance to visit the Academy, where he was not looking, but searching. He understood what the Crystal Palace meant, but didn’t like the meaning. The Academy pictures, sacred, grand-historical, domestic, fruit-and-flowers, animals and children, seemed not to have meaning at all. Maclise he particularly objected to, resenting the Maclise illustrations to La Motte Fouqué. The picture of the year was Frith’s Ramsgate Sands, which was bought by Queen Victoria; what Ned was looking for was spirituality expressed through colour. In the Stones of Venice Ruskin had just written of colour as the ‘sacred and saving element – the divine gift to the sight of man’. He had also dismissed Salvator Rosa’s pictures as ‘gray’; as Burne-Jones told Rooke, ‘I was very sorry when Mr Ruskin said I mustn’t like Salvator Rosa, but I didn’t hesitate.’⁹ Only in Holman Hunt’s Light of the World, which was exhibited in the Academy that summer, did he find what he was beginning to understand by colour. Later he came to feel that Hunt’s eccentric schemes only worked on very small canvases ‘and then they can’t be put out of mind’.¹⁰ He ceased to admire the Light ‘except for the lantern light, and the things against the door’. But in 1854 he had not yet seen a Rossetti.

The next months had to be spent in the crowded little house in the Bristol Road, where Miss Sampson cooked as she had always done and Ned had to conceal from her in the old way his painful religious doubts. He was also tormented, as he wrote to Crom Price, by ‘love-troubles I have been getting into’, and terribly stuck with the drawings for The Fairy Family. Morris’s letters described the wonders of the cathedral towns of northern France, and gave as much comfort as the travel letters of luckier friends usually do.

Term was late, because of the cholera epidemic, and Ned was ‘sick of home and idleness’. But Morris blew back like a rough wind with a whiff of French onions and water-meadows, and in October they were able to get rooms next to each other in the old buildings at Exeter, appropriately ‘gable-roofed and pebble-dashed’. Here Morris began a new series of readings, this time from Chaucer. He was not disappointed in Ned’s reaction, and perhaps did not notice that, once again, it was different from his own. Burne-Jones’s interpretation of Chaucer was weaker than Morris’s, but more subtle. He never liked the fabliaux, and thought of them, just as to begin with he thought of Morris’s table manners, as the lessening of an image. Before long he came to accept Morris as he was, but he continued to avoid the Miller’s Tale. On the other hand he was a most discriminating reader of the Legend of Good Women, the Parlement of Fowls, the House of Fame and the Romaunt of the Rose. With true insight, he saw Chaucer as sophisticated, courtly and sad. He understood perfectly Criseyde’s remark that we are wretched if we despair of happiness, but fools if we expect it; he responded to what was wistful, dry and ironic in Chaucer, and also to his occasional lapses into total sentimentality. It was only when, at the end of their lives, Morris and Burne-Jones set out at last to collaborate on the Kelmscott Chaucer that the discrepancy between them, which they would never admit, appeared.

It might still be possible, it seemed in the autumn of 1854, to found the Brotherhood, even if by now it would have only the most tenuous link with Newman. Crom Price was still willing. But Morris had begun to write poetry, was mad about the French cathedrals which everyone must visit at once; Crom noticed that the two friends ‘diverged more and more in views, though not in friendship’. It was at this point that Burne-Jones ‘wanted very much to go and get killed’ and actually tried to join the army: the Crimean War had been declared in March, and the Government was offering commissions to undergratuates to replace the terrible losses from untreated wounds and Asiatic cholera; Ned applied to the Engineers,¹¹ and would have been just in time for the march on Balaclava. It was a mercy that he was rejected on the score of delicate health as, neat though he was in all his movements, he was defeated by the simplest mechanical devices, even drawing-pins.

Morris himself put an end to this agony by the sheer presence of friendship; and at the end of May 1855, when they ought to have been entering seriously on their second Trinity term, they were all at Camberwell – Ned, Morris and Crom Price – scrambling about London to see pictures. They had got permission to visit the collection of Benjamin Windus, which at this time included Millais’s Isabella, Madox Brown’s The Last of England, and Arthur Hughes’s study for The Knight of the Sun, though Windus, like other collectors, had ‘laid off’ by buying Maclise’s Youthful Gallantry. But there were no Rossettis in his house at Tottenham Green, and therefore nothing to correspond with the Blessed Damozel, which Morris and Burne-Jones had just read in a chance copy of The Germ. At the end of the summer, however, they were introduced at Oxford to Mr Combe himself – kindly, encouraging, boring, a patron of Hunt and Millais since 1850. At Mr Combe’s they saw, at last, a water-colour drawing by Rossetti – The First Anniversary of the Death of Beatrice – Dante Drawing the Angel.

All that the friends liked was ‘jolly’; everything they did not like was ‘seedy’. Morris still felt that the French cathedrals had been jolliest of all and that Ned must see them; since Ned was too poor to afford the train fares, they must go about on foot. A walking party was made up for the next vacation – Morris, Ned, Crom, William Fulford – though at the last moment Crom could not come.

This was Burne-Jones’s first venture abroad. Fulford and he read Keats to each other at the railway hotel at Folkestone before the crossing, and at Amiens he was up early to make a drawing of a street scene. As they walked the French roads, the rich mythology of William Morris developed; his boots were uncomfortable and he tramped on in ‘gay carpet slippers’, attempting, like the Heir of Redclyffe, to control his violent temper. The slippers wore out as they reached Beauvais, where they attended High Mass at the cathedral on 22 July.

Beauvais, like Hereford, Burne-Jones apprehended as a synthesis of music and spatial relations: ‘the ancient singing … and the great organ that made the air tremble … and the roof, and the long lights that are the most graceful things man has ever made.’ But with this Morris had little patience. He had hoped to avoid Paris altogether, dreading the effect on his temper of the restorations to Notre Dame; but Burne-Jones in particular wanted to see the Louvre, and Morris consoled himself by leading his friend up to Fra Angelico’s Coronation of the Virgin, making him shut his eyes and only open them at the last moment. ‘I didn’t imagine I liked painting till I saw Fra Angelico,’¹² he told Rooke. They bought engravings of the Coronation, regretting that there were no coloured ones.

At Rouen he wanted to hear vespers every afternoon and evening, and was disappointed that they had to wait till Saturday. They travelled, since the failure of the carpet slippers, mainly by the hated railway and ‘a queer little contrivance with one horse’, of which the expense must have been paid largely by Morris. They went home through Chartres, then, en route for Calvados, to Le Havre. It was there, as they walked back and forth on the quays in the summer night, that decision came to them and they ‘resolved definitely that we would begin a life of art’. Morris was to be an architect, and Burne-Jones (whose main experience was still his inability to draw The Fairy Family) was to be a painter. Neither of them felt that this was in any way a desertion. As Morris wrote to his mother, they were ‘by no means giving up their thoughts for bettering the world’. ‘We were bent on that road for the whole past year’, Burne-Jones remembered, ‘and after that night’s talk we never hesitated more. That was the most memorable night of my life.’

It is odd to reflect that only a few months later Whistler was to arrive in Paris as a student of the avant-garde and was to begin the ‘French set’ – the etchings of northern France. At first sight, nothing could be more different than Whistler’s ferociously painterly approach and Burne-Jones’s self-dedication to what he had felt, through space and music, as the life of the spirit. In no case would the two have collided as Ned walked blindly up to the Coronation. And yet, when in later years Burne-Jones told Rooke: ‘I don’t want to copy objects; I want to show people something’,¹³ the two came closer together than Whistler would have cared to admit.

The decision which Morris and Ned had made on the quays needed endless talking over: separation was impossible, and Morris soon went to Birmingham, where he must either have slept in the dining-room, or shared with the Joneses’ lodger.